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FILM; In Film, Still a Missionary

By DANA KENNEDY

Published: February 23, 2003

HE calls himself the son of ''the least successful missionaries in history,'' and his own attempts to smuggle Bibles into Eastern Europe, just before the fall of Communism, fell flat.

But Charles Randolph has managed to crack Hollywood seemingly with ease -- and get a message out at the same time. The second movie he wrote, ''The Life of David Gale,'' a thriller about the death penalty, was released on Friday and stars Kevin Spacey, Kate Winslet and Laura Linney. Mr. Spacey plays a popular professor and respected death penalty opponent who finds himself on death row for the rape and murder of a fellow activist, played by Ms. Linney.

''My intent was to get people to talk about the death penalty,'' said Mr. Randolph, during a recent trip to Manhattan. ''I want three hours of your life. The two hours when you watch it and the hour you discuss it afterward.''

Mr. Randolph, a boyish-looking 39, often speaks in the erudite tones of academia, where he spent seven years after graduating from Yale Divinity School. He approached screenwriting just as he had the many subjects that had obsessed him, and he looks to have seamlessly made the transition to Hollywood. He is engaged to the actress Mili Avital, and his third original screenplay, another thriller called ''The Interpreter,'' is being readied for production.

In writing ''The Life of David Gale,'' Mr. Randolph drew on his childhood as the son of missionaries who frowned on television but loved Agatha Christie mysteries and Hitchcock thrillers. It is doubtful that many commercial screenwriters come from a background like Mr. Randolph's: he lived through his father's expulsion from Jordan for preaching to Muslims and his ouster from Greece for trying to convert members of the Greek Orthodox Church. After his own dream of becoming a ''James Bond for Jesus,'' pushing Bibles in Poland and elsewhere, slowly fizzled, he gradually lost faith in organized religion. He next spent almost a decade in Vienna, teaching philosophy and culture at various universities in the 1990's.

At times, Mr. Randolph uses such arcane language, expounding on tenets of film theory like paratextuality, that it is difficult to understand what he is saying.

Mr. Randolph used his background in philosophy to develop three of the main characters in ''The Life of David Gale.'' ''Every character represents a different philosophy,'' he said. ''David Gale is the Socratic figure. The cowboy'' -- played by Matt Craven -- ''is a classical Stoic figure. And Constance'' -- Ms. Linney's character -- ''is a second-wave feminist.''

What he learned while teaching and studying film theory in Vienna helped him write more than one surprise into ''David Gale.'' ''It taught me to have an extra twist -- one for the marketing, that audiences might figure out -- and another one,'' Mr. Randolph said.

''Some people are too clever for their own good,'' said Alan Parker, who directed ''The Life of David Gale.'' ''And he's a genuine intellectual, but he doesn't use it as a weapon in any way. He was very resilient about any changes I told him I wanted to make. He wasn't precious about it. He was quite virginal when he was with me. He might not continue that way.''

His parents, who moved back to the United States when Mr. Randolph was about 6, were disappointed in his change of heart, but he says they remain close.

While teaching, Mr. Randolph explored a new field of study every year: Czech New Wave cinema, British advertising and American political rhetoric, among others. Mr. Randolph also practiced each new subject. When he was teaching courses like ''The Avant-Garde in Advertising,'' he created advertising campaigns for several nonprofit organizations, among them Amnesty International.

The first screenplay he wrote, a 1998 homage to John Waters called ''Fat,'' got him an agent at Creative Artists Agency. Nicolas Cage's production company acquired ''The Life of David Gale'' soon after hearing a pitch.

Mr. Randolph dates his interest in the death penalty to the time a newspaper reporter in Vienna asked him where he stood on the issue. ''I said I was more or less for it,'' he recalls. ''My students were up in arms when they read that, not because I was for it but because I'd casually thrown it away as if it were a nonissue. I was teaching a course in ethics, and I gave a lecture on it after reading up on the subject. The conclusion I came to was less polemical than David Gale: I argued that the potential for killing innocents is too great to justify.''

Mr. Randolph's next film, ''The Interpreter'' is less of a message movie. But after years of what he describes as being an ''itinerant intellectual,'' he plans on making screenwriting his mission indefinitely.

''Film involves so many disciplines,'' he said. ''I finally found something that satiates me.''

Photo: Charles Randolph, the writer of ''The Life of David Gale,'' outside his house in the Hollywood Hills: his first produced screenplay. (Steve Goldstein for The New York Times)